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Kosher Nostra

The Holocaust bought the Jews 60 years of protection, six decades in which it was taboo to suggest that a Jewish conspiracy, with its dirty tentacles everywhere, had the system in its grip. After news of the camps spread across America, the Ivy League colleges relaxed quotas, the white-shoe firms started hiring, the country clubs let Jews on the greens. People suddenly realized that if, in less than a decade, the Jewish members of the most sophisticated society in the world could be isolated, stripped of property and killed en masse, perhaps they had not been so powerful after all.

Well, 60 years are up.

So here we go!

In “Supermob,” his book about the legendary Chicago fixer Sidney Korshak (1907-96), a lawyer for the Capone outfit and counselor to Hollywood moguls, notably the onetime MCA chairman Lew Wasserman, Gus Russo retells the story of our time as a conspiracy of Jews. (Russo is also the author of “The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America.”) This is how he begins: “Two types of power dominated the 20th century: the visible, embodied in politicians, corporate moguls, crime bosses and law enforcement; and the invisible, concentrated in the hands of a few power brokers generally of Eastern European and Jewish immigrant heritage. Operating safely in the shadows, these men often pulled the strings of the visible power brokers. Although they remained nameless to the public, they were notorious among a smattering of enterprising investigators who, over decades, followed their brilliant, amoral and frequently criminal careers. The late Senate investigator and author Walter Sheridan dubbed them the Supermob.”

Note the terms: “nameless,” “shadows,” “invisible.” Notice too that included in the list of visible power brokers are the crime bosses, the Gottis and Gigantes, while in the background are the real power brokers, the Jews, whom Russo routinely refers to as the Ashkenazim — an ethnic distinction that connotes all the Jews of Eastern Europe — as if this were the name of a secret cult.

Photo

Sidney Korshak testifying in 1957 before a Senate committee on improper labor and management activities.Credit
Bettmann/Corbis

At its center, “Supermob” is the story of Korshak, the last of the old time go-betweens, the man who could take care of anything with a call. Raised in Lawndale, then a Jewish neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, he attended the University of Wisconsin and DePaul. In his early days as a lawyer, he took cases for the Capone outfit, representing small-time runners and hoods, and was so committed to the job he never escaped the gang’s orbit. Over the years, he came to provide a necessary service — he was the link between the chief executives and factory bosses and the rough boys who controlled the unions.

In the 1950’s, the mob sent him west (“Los Angeles, in particular, was known as a city receptive to both hoodlums and Jews,” Russo writes), where, among other tasks, Korshak funneled dirty money into real estate and films, including the 1976 version of “King Kong” and “A Bridge Too Far,” making it clean. He did not keep records or have an office, but instead worked from a table at the Bistro in Beverly Hills. According to the book, even his legit clients — MCA, Hilton — benefited from his underworld magic: strikes averted, sweetheart deals. With a call to Kirk Kerkorian, who controlled MGM, Korshak freed Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone in “The Godfather.” Over lunch, he got Universal to yield rights for the Paramount remake of “King Kong.” He helped get Jimmy Hoffa out of jail, was pals with Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra, and dated the same woman (Jill St. John) as Henry Kissinger. Russo suggests that Korshak was a model for Tom Hagen, the consigliere played by Robert Duvall in “The Godfather.”

How much of this is fact and how much legend is for the reader to decide. There is a lot of gossip here, guilt by association, innuendo — Russo quotes an actress named Selene Walters who says she was raped by Reagan in 1952, two weeks before he married Nancy Davis — but Korshak was clearly an influential figure. The system needed him, so he appeared. The problem is with the broader context Russo paints, in which Korshak and a handful of men with Jewish-sounding names are seen less as freely acting individuals than as cogs in a secret machine. Again and again, Russo strikes the sort of taboo-breaking pose that makes me nervous, the way any sentence that follows the phrase “Let’s be honest” makes me nervous. Whenever I started to get caught up in the story, I ran into sentences like this: “Throughout history, the Jews were never the public leaders; they were always the kingmakers and the power brokers. ... They worked surreptitiously, choosing to focus on the substrata of a business or event.” Or: “The Jews’ historical Diaspora (dispersion) and relative lack of national roots helped them to identify and exploit more quickly the most lucrative emerging markets.”

I’m not saying Korshak was not powerful, was not connected, did not know how to get a project moving or shut down. He was and did all these things, and that’s what makes his story so interesting. It just seems to me — sensitive Ashkenazi that I am — that in making his case Russo deploys some very old notions of Jewish double-dealing and conspiracy, without which his larger ideas about Korshak and the world would fall apart. The fact is, every immigrant community in this country has spawned an underworld and every underworld has needed guys like Korshak. This does not make him a typically Jewish figure. It makes him a typically American figure. Or as Bellow’s Augie March proclaims, “I am an American, Chicago born.”

It reminds me of the routine in which Dave Chappelle talks about first learning of the stereotype about blacks and fried chicken. “All these years, I thought I liked chicken because it was delicious,” Chappelle says. “Turns out I am genetically predisposed to liking chicken. I got no say in the matter.” Well, I felt the same way when I finished “Supermob”: I thought Sidney Korshak became a powerful figure because he was crooked and ambitious and smart. Turns out he was just Jewish.

Rich Cohen is the author of “Tough Jews” and “Sweet and Low: A Family Story.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 78 of the New York edition with the headline: Kosher Nostra. Today's Paper|Subscribe